Since 2005... Auckland
Medical Aid Trust Scholarship... $25,000 per year ...
For doctoral students in New Zealand
Five applications received this year. The Scholarship
Committee is currently processing applications
and no decision has yet been reached.
Application through the New Zealand Vice Chancellors' Committee
Applications close 1 November each year.
It can be argued that the objectives of AMAT embrace the (re)production of
the human subject.
Education, as a discipline and as an event, is crucial to the investigation of the
process of producing
human beings.
Education as an event - a phenomenon - is a both an informal and a formal
process through which the
'naked' child takes on the physical and metaphysical clothing of its community.
Education as a discipline investigates how this happens, how it can be made to
happen better, and
whether or not we can justify some or all of the happenings associated with the
education of the child.
There is therefore, a descriptive, an instrumental and an ethical element
to much education research,
although obviously some research is more instrumental (how can we do it
better) and some is more
ethical (should we be doing this?).
There is often a kind of indignant reaction to education research along the
lines that we should leave
people alone to just get on with it- leave the kids
alone as Pink Floyd sang, or stop interfering in family
disciplinary practices (spare the rod and spoil the child), or leave
teachers alone so they can get on
with it - as if there were an it which is innocent of education.
Children are educated by parents, siblings,
peers, teachers, reading, and the media in all its forms. Their environment
educates them, one way or
another. To envisage a child growing up without learning is like asking a tadpole
to grow up out of water.
When Education as a discipline describes, prescribes or evaluates the learning
experiences of children it
is not in a situation where an alternative to education is possible. An alternative
to formal education may
be possible, but not to education itself, understood in its wider connotations of
learning and socialisation.
In this wider sense, education is what enables a community to grow its own
replacements. Children are
socialised or educated into seeing themselves as members of specific
communities who take part in
quite definable practices - hip hop, Passover, Christmas, circumcision, Diwali.
There are various viewpoints in the current debate about what makes a good
education.
Marxist: It is an important criticism of education that its function is
purely to train people as
replacements: that it preserves existing social distinctions and functions and does
not have a reforming
or diversifying role. Moreover, in formal education, the criticism is more severe:
formal education focuses
on the practices, beliefs and needs of the ruling group and reproduces a society in
which the dominant
party not only continues to rule, but its rule is legitimated through the
practices of education, because
the definition of what counts - as practices and as curriculum - is in line with
the assumptions of the
ruling group, and others are led to accept these practices and assumptions as
sufficient reason for their
own continued neglect.
The underlying point of this kind of criticism is that education can become a
vehicle for changing the
human subject: it can help people to become aware of the injustices from which they
either suffer or
prosper, and by sensitising people, and calling these practices into question,
education can make a
difference in the direction of greater social justice. Note that this kind of
change can only be done by
procuring a change in the nature of the person themselves: they have to believe
differently, question,
act, etc in a way which is not typical of their own parents or social group.
Liberal: Another criticism of education comes from the liberal point of
the political compass: it is that
education is often a form of deliberate manipulation of students in order to create
some kind of artificial
ideal society. If education is seen in the wider sense of socialisation and
learning however, accusations
of social engineering are meaningless: all education is social
engineering. The forms which we or a
society are accustomed to become naturalised so that it is taken for
granted that people go through
those steps to become adult persons, rather than perceiving that the adult persons
produced by that
society are procured by the educational steps they go through. Education which
produces adults who
are just like ourselves does not so readily evoke accusations of social
engineering. But an education
system which produces adults who are conspicuously different to ourselves does,
especially if our
children are among the students!
The underlying assumption of this form of reproof is that there is a natural
individual: a kind of essential
person whose nature can be enhanced or deformed by education. Education
and training enhances
that persons essential being. Social engineering does not. The
autonomy of the individual is threatened
by an education system which imposes some kind of learning on the child which it
would not have
chosen, or its parents would not have chosen for it.
Néo-liberal: the notion of the autonomous individual, or the
autonomous chooser, is the dominant idea
of néo-liberalism. It is a little unclear though, from the neo-liberal literature
who is autonomous; it seems
to be the parent who is the chooser - the child is constructed as something more
akin to the property of
the parent. So the parent has the right to choose the education he (rarely she)
wants for their child.
Education is a commodity which the chooser purchases, and is then added to the
child who emerges with
added value. The choice is conducted along the usual néo-liberal lines
of maximising value to the
purchaser. Value is seen as financial, rather than social, emotional or cultural.
The choice of education is
therefore likely to be a choice of vocational education with a strong expectation
of future dividend. The
individual it produces will be markedly different to that produced by a
liberal arts or religious education.
Human capital theory: is a subset of néo-liberal theory. Investment in
education is a an investment in
the business of oneself, and is therefore a private matter. However, public
prosperity is dependent upon
the creation of certain kinds of workers, and it is an appropriate task for
government and public
education to create those skilled workers for the needs of the economy. This
however must not be read
as for the needs of the state, (which would be a position acceptable to
Marxists) but rather as
acceptable to business which has become identified in common parlance
with the economy.
Post-structuralism: Post -structuralism is more of a critique of other
theories and positions than a
theory or position in itself. However, some of its proponents see it as a kind of
super-liberalism:
post-structuralism, by denying the power of meta-narratives, makes the student
truly free to choose
whatever kind of education they want. Other see it as a form of updated Marxism: by
recognising the
power that society, history, culture have on the production of the subject,
post-structuralists destabilise
the notion of the autonomous individual, but by similarly identifying the
contingent, spatially and
temporally located nature of those influences, post-structuralists also destabilise
the certainties of
conventional Marxism.
All these elements can be seen in current debates around the issues of physical
and social reproduction.
In my opinion, it is as appropriate for AMAT to interest itself in these debates
concerning social theory as
it is to pursue matters of purely technological relevance to the (re)production of
the human subject.
Nesta Devine